A BIOGRAPHY of Vladimir N abokov is, to use one of those gently recondite but exact poly- syllabic words that the Master cher- ished and honed to lustrous precision, "supernumerary"-like a second but- ler or an ancillary housemaid in reserve for Sundays. N abokov was, supremely and incessantly, the biographer of him- self. There have been many writers who have composed autobiographies, memoirs, recollections. There have been more who have inwoven the rec- ord of their lives with their poetry or fiction, often inextricably. The N a- bokov case is more intense. This virtu- oso of imagining imagined, in essence, only the shimmering procession of his own works and days. What he invented was himself (more directly and in a more immediately documentary way than Proust, even). There is scarcely a page in Nabokov-and this includes the arcane, haughty philology of his edition of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" -that is not a facsimile, although sometimes masked, of his personal ex- istence. If we had only "Mary" (the first novel, published in the spring of 1926), "Speak, Memory," "Laughter in the Dark" "The Gift" and "Ada" , , , there would not be much in N abokov's peregrine existence and inward king- doms which we could not date and reconstruct. Even the purest fictions, such as "Invitation to a Beheading," "Lolita," and the incomparable "Pale Fire," are radically "mirrored"; they are sharp splinters of intimately chron- icled self-reflection. And such works as "The Defense" and "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" are almost straight- forwardly confessional. They conjoin readily with what we have of Na- bokov's letters and with the witness of his contemporaries and familiars. The first volume of Brian Boyd's mon umen tal "Vladimir N abokov" (Princeton University Press; $25) is, therefore, something of a luxury, a dispensable celebration. The industry is prodigious: bibliographlcal, finan- cial, amorous circumstances are mar- shalled in extenso; the political-social backdrop is voluminously provided. Even so, this compendium takes us only to Nabokov's flight from collapsing France in May, 1940. (The magician was born in 1899, on April 23rd- 'Y : ø' \ .. t( BOOKS Grandmaster Shakespeare's birthday.) Boyd tells us much, perhaps too much. It is not entirely his failing if this great labor of love leaves one with a complex, hybrid sentiment of superfluity and, at the same time, of lack, of a center still elusive. Vladimir Nabokov's own snapshots and frescoes of his opulent, highly cul- tured, polyglot childhood in St. Peters- burg, of the passionately loved country estate, of regal travels abroad are prod- igal. They restore to invulnerable pres- ence the twilight years of the con- demned, lost world of the Russian élite prior to the disasters of 1905 and the apocalypse of 1917. In N abokov's whole work there is no figure more commanding, more stellar (in the sense of a cool radiance) than that of his father, the eminent legal scholar and liberal politician. The travel log in "The Gift," at once minutely docu- mentary and transfigured into tranquil epic, of the fictional journeys made by a character based on N abokov's father through Siberia, Central Asia, and the marches of Tibet is among the touch- stones of twentieth-century remem- brance. Brian Boyd fills in graphic details: a visit to Biarritz in the autumn ' &, ^ "'" f J ^ i 4!0 , ' ,., I I ...........,,- -- f ( 1 '*^ \ '" j t'* -.e-of> ,:,,:.J' .t . j ì j ..... t i'" , :'1 ît "! ii* , '* -.... \ ,..::. ''.o .:- ,., ") , , -\o' K " 1. ;.. '" , } ,",# -t' -.. ' .. . \.,1' " ".. , 't ., : , . .t'... ,II., :t :""^- \* I ''1f · :' t fIt# 't ........ . J !!' , r^ ^J!- . . > i? . f : ..t.i ,': i' f' : . "t<t ,,:. :#, ,; fe, 1 * ' , ji " 'f.f f , t 'Í1' ' . t \ \; 153 of 1909 entailed tutor, maid, governess, nurse, valet, and dachshund. Three years earlier, the boy Nabokov, follow- ing a family tradition, had discovered butterflies Their vibrant drift, their depths of camouflage, their ephemeral but tenacious life cycles, the emblemat- ic secret of their metamorphoses (in which he came to perceive the very spoor of primal creation and of art) were to throng N abokov's existence. Lepidopterology is, like chess, integral to the genius of grave playfulness, of microscopic notice, of self-distancing from the human commonplace which determines Nabokov's writings and per- sona. It is no accident, though Boyd does not argue the connection, that it was in November, 1917, when the family had found harried refuge in the Crimea, that N abokov composed his first chess problem. There had been mellifluous verse, published, at the author's expense, in 1916. A first novel followed, and a garland of flirtations in the approved style of the dandy. English, taught him by a pride of governesses and tutors, was to Nabokov second nature. Brian Boyd gives us the facts, and these mat- ter. But it is the absolutely pivotal, ,, 'O"'> -.4 . c: , t '- , -..... "-"", ...4 <' 1 *" , i. 3'.." t "" ..- "'-$.---.. "., f' '1-", : ....... è- ' is', , 1 }'.' f , f" t : if} 1 l' . "I t ^' \ . - .. % & . t f i i ø '0''"'- w '\ c" .... '<; t ."" "N on-smoking) pro-choice) beginning to question our military presence zn the Persian Gulf) and not too near the kztchen) please.))